Ezra Pound’s Dramatic Works: Vorticist Noh Theater

The paper discusses one of the least known episodes in Ezra Pound’s literary biography: his plays modelled on the Noh written in 1916 and published in 1987. I focus on the two plays that seem to be most completed, i.e. “A Supper at the House of Mademoiselle Rachelle” and “Tristan”. The former is essentially a text by de Musset slightly edited by Pound. The analysis of Pound’s corrections reveals a pattern – an attempt to realize the Noh concept of the unity of image and the intensification of image, which Pound found in E. Fenollosa’s manuscripts. According to the “Japanese” principle of image superposition, Pound juxtaposes several literary texts and traditions. He offers us his reading of de Musset’s reading of Racine, with the final scene alluding to Rembrandt. This multilayer construct is wrapped in a Noh-like form, which unmistakably reminds of vorticist manifestos. A similar telescopic arrangement is also manifested in “Tristan”. The analysis of vorticist transformations of the Noh highlights a gap between the characters and the narrative shaped by their words. Alluding to Berul, Bernart de Ventadorn and Joseph Bédier, the characters recreate not so much the story of their life but rather stories written about their story. Thus, the play becomes a metaphor of literature as an atemporal structure of texts echoing each other. On the whole, Pound’s drama is a step towards a “long vorticist poem”. The major motifs of the plays, i.e. those of transformation, of talking to the dead and of the repeat in history, will soon appear as the key structural principles of the Cantos.